


Nobody Ever Made You a Monster

by scioscribe



Category: Wiseguy
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Rescue, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:54:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21834013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: He walked right up to the bartender and said, “I’m looking for Terranova.”“Uh-huh.  So was Christopher Columbus.”“Oh, good,” Frank said.  “You’re funny.  I was worried I wasn’t going to meet anybody funny today.”
Relationships: Dan "Lifeguard" Burroughs & Frank McPike & Vinnie Terranova, Frank McPike & Vinnie Terranova
Comments: 7
Kudos: 25
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Nobody Ever Made You a Monster

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



> I want to thank you for the glorious idea of Frank sourly facing down the supernatural.
> 
> There's a nod of the head to _Goodfellas_ in Frank's conversation with the bartender.

“These guys aren’t your typical goombahs, Frank. I don’t know, I can’t get a fix on them.”

And it showed, too. Vinnie looked like twelve different kinds of hell—one or two of them were even new, when Frank would have thought they’d been through the whole rainbow of shitty possibilities together already. He was beat. Their last little in-person chat had been three days ago, and it had been a long three days that somehow stretched out even longer now, with him looking at Vince and thinking, _Something’s wrong._

Three days ago, Vinnie had had some unusual early-assignment jitters—“It’s like there’s an alarm ringing somewhere and I’m just an inch away from being able to hear it”—but he’d been more or less fine. Now, though, Vinnie looked like he’d spent their time apart not sleeping, not eating, not doing anything at all except letting himself cultivate one hell of a case of five o’clock shadow. It looked almost blue-black against how chalky his skin was.

Frank had seen a lot of trouble in his life, but he’d never seen an OCB case that could make a man lose ten pounds in three days. Undercover work wasn’t this year’s answer to Jenny Craig.

The bloodshot eyes were sadly familiar. The feverish shine in them wasn’t.

He felt worry in the pit of his stomach, cold and heavy like a medicine ball. He could have something on his hands here that he couldn’t do a thing about, and there wasn’t much he liked less than that.

“I don’t think we have to worry about that right now, Vince.” He kept his voice even. “You look like you’re coming down with something. I’m pulling you in.”

Vinnie shook his head, going into that bullheaded act that at least meant he was still up to arguing. “I’ve got it under control. It’s just a bug or something.”

“Yeah, I’d find that a lot more believable if you weren’t shaking so hard your teeth are chattering.”

“All right, so I got a fever. I don’t want to come in for it. I’ll take an aspirin and drink some orange juice. You want, I’ll even call my mother and get her chicken soup recipe.”

“You’re _out_ ,” Frank said. “It’s not a debate, it’s not a discussion, it’s a goddamn fact.”

Well, so much for that hope of keeping his voice even.

He exhaled. “You don’t know how bad you look, Vince. I want you in a hospital.”

Vinnie had that particular kind of neighborhood-kid beefy good looks that all the right kind of people took to mean he was nothing but dumb muscle—presentable enough to put in a suit, canny enough to manage a little business, but without enough going on under the hood to be running a whole other game in his head. Frank knew better. He could see the gears turning in Vinnie’s eyes.

He didn’t know that he’d ever gotten Vince to do one single thing Vince didn’t want to do.

Mostly because if he ever made it clear how much was on the line for him, Vince would start wanting it too. He had a real allergy to letting people down.

But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t wait until the last minute to do one of those dramatic Terranova saves.

“Give me twenty-four hours,” Vince said finally.

“I could’ve sworn I just said it wasn’t a negotiation.”

Vinnie had a smile that was too sweet for the business they were in; it was something Frank knew he’d probably lose if he did the job much longer. “Yeah, but you’re still talking to me.”

“What else am I supposed to do, tase you? Take you out of here at gunpoint?”

“Hey, just another day at the office.”

Frank sighed. “I want your word right now that if I give you twenty-four hours, and I pull you then, I’m not gonna sit through another little begging session of yours where you want _another_ twenty-four, or twelve, or even fifteen minutes. Are we clear on that? You dope yourself up on aspirin, you get some actual sleep, and you close up whatever needs closing. The job doesn’t require you to kill yourself, believe it or not. I can tell you right now, all the usual bad guys will still be waiting for you when you’re back on your feet. And don’t look at me like that.”

“You know what Uncle Mike says, don’t you?”

“No, but from your whole cat-that-ate-the-canary look, I don’t think I want to.”

Vinnie stuck his hands in his pockets. Someone who wasn’t looking too closely, Frank thought sourly, could even miss that he did that to hide how much he was still shivering. “Says you’ve got a weakness for my puppy dog eyes.”

“Yeah, well, you do bring that out in people, Vince. Even in your targets. Which is one of the reasons you’re good at your job, which is why—not your puppy dog eyes—I’m not going to let you run yourself into the ground.”

“Sure, a likely story.”

He didn’t know that he liked it that Vince could keep it together this well when he had to be dead on his feet. It worried him, made him wonder what he could have missed over the time they’d been working together. “Promise me, Vinnie.”

“I’d shake on it, except I’d wind up giving you the flu or whatever this is.” Another one of those teeth-clacking shivers. “You’ve got my word on it, Frank.”

That had been twenty-five hours ago.

And here Frank was, standing on an oil patch in the middle of an out-of-business garage, alone.

He went to the payphone again.

Dan picked up before Frank even heard the first ring. “Frank?”

“Yeah, still just me. You heard anything?”

“If I’d heard something, you’d have heard something.”

True enough, but he couldn’t seem to get himself to stop calling anyway. “And you said he made his afternoon check-in.”

“Yep, right on time. He sounded like hell, but he said you’d know that already.”

“That’s about the only thing right now I do know.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbing at the indentations his glasses always left there, trying to think.

“One word, Frank, and I’ll have every agent in town ready to crash through some doors for you. If you decide you need to call it—”

“I tried calling it last night, goddammit, only he wouldn’t listen. And I let him get away with not listening.”

Breaking down some doors and turning over all the usual rocks would be a hell of a therapy trip to make up for the guilt he was feeling, but he wasn’t sure it would do much good. None of the charges here were solid enough yet to scare anyone into talking. All he’d do was send the cockroaches scurrying under the fridge—and for all he knew, they’d take Vinnie with him. And if he blew Vinnie’s cover in this kind of chaos, Frank would never see him again. Not alive.

“Give me six hours,” he said, painfully aware that he was pretty much bargaining with Dan the way Vinnie had bargained with him. And if it had been a bad idea in one case, it was probably a bad idea in the other. “If I don’t turn him up by then, I’m clearing you now to rain down whatever kind of hell we can bring to bear. But I’m going to have a go at a more subtle approach first.”

***

The trouble was that Vinnie was right: the guys he was in with now weren’t your run-of-the-mill mobsters.

They’d been talking about that for weeks. He had all the intel he needed, he was sure of it, if he could just put it together.

Or else he was wrong and holding off would get Vince killed. All kinds of fun possibilities.

Frank sat in his car with his eyes closed, trying to remember every helpful word that had come out of Vinnie’s mouth in the last three weeks.

The gang was run—unequivocally—by a man named Richard Keene. Rich, to his friends—something Vinnie was close to becoming. But his boys didn’t call themselves the Keene _famiglia_ , and if they had, it wouldn’t have made a hell of a lot of sense, considering they were like a real _kumbaya_ melting pot, Irish in with Italians in with Cubans in with Czechs. Most mob action split along Old Country heritage, and when it didn’t do that, it never, ever went so far as to have anything like the real, living mix of people you got in an honest community. You didn’t have a gang that was part-black and part-white and part-Puerto Rican.

Unless, apparently, you were Richard Keene, who seemed to practice nondiscriminatory hiring. Good for him. But Frank somehow doubted the city had coughed up a more ethical kind of criminal; he just didn’t tend to get that lucky. Keene had some kind of selection principle he was operating on, and it wasn’t anything that would make his mother proud.

So there was that. They didn’t have families or languages or neighborhoods in common, and they didn’t call themselves anything. They seemed to have loyalty without working for it, at least among themselves.

They didn’t do sit-downs and they didn’t do negotiations. And people who pissed them off already had a nasty habit of disappearing.

Good body disposal, too. Nothing had surfaced yet.

He could think of crooks he liked better.

Of all the hands for his guy to fall into—

And of course they had to be about the only crooks who made _Vinnie Terranova_ nervous.

But all right. He’d focus. He had six hours.

He drove to a bar Vinnie had mentioned, a hangout for Keene associates. He walked in with no plan and a headache that felt like it was going to stave him in two at his temples. It was all a bad idea, but he didn’t have a better one.

It wasn’t exactly a full house. He walked right up to the bartender and said, “I’m looking for Terranova.”

“Uh-huh. So was Christopher Columbus.”

“Oh, good,” Frank said. “You’re funny. I was worried I wasn’t going to meet anybody funny today.”

The bartender fixed him with the stink eye. “You looking for trouble?”

“No, just for Vinnie Terranova. Six foot even, dark hair, blue eyes, likes to wear a leather jacket and work as an enforcer.”

“You look like an accountant, but you talk like a cop.”

“I can arrest you like a cop too,” Frank said. “But that’s not why I’m here. Trouble follows Terranova like a bad smell, and there are three major league assault cases I need to talk to him about because they’ve got that smell all over them. You can help me and send me on my way, or I can hang around here all day, drinking seltzer and looking like an accountant and talking to you like we’re old pals. We can see what your clientele thinks about that. See how many of them are smart enough to figure out I’m not just here to do your taxes. _Vinnie Terranova_.”

Was it his imagination or did this whole bar stink like a dog kennel? He’d bet the health inspector could have a field day with this place.

The bartender touched his lips with the tip of his tongue. He lowered his voice. “Look, buddy, you poke around Keene’s business and you’re sticking your hand into a wasp’s nest. He was bringing Terranova in. I’ve seen it before—they prep a guy for a few days, making him sick as hell, and then he goes away for a while. And when he comes back—he’s just like all the rest of them. I don’t know anything else.”

Some kind of cult, maybe. That was additional bullshit they didn’t need. If Keene had Vinnie stashes somewhere with his eyelids taped open and LSD rewiring his brain—

He stayed quiet. “If you’re talking to me right now, I’m assuming none of Keene’s boys are in here.”

The bartender hitched up his chin in a kind of half-nod.

“All right. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to have a seat right down there at the end of the bar. Anyone asks, I’m a salesman, I tried to upsell you on some of the brands of pretzels and peanuts you keep around, you didn’t bite, and now I’m drinking my sorrows away. When one of Keene’s boys comes in, you’re going to get me another drink. Hell, make it something top-shelf if it’ll make you feel better for the hassle. I’ll pay for it. And that’s all.”

“That’s all?”

Frank nodded.

He went to the end of the bar, like he’d said, and watched another forty-five minutes of his six hours drip away like water from a sponge. He toyed with the little wedge of lime the bartender had put in his club soda. He ate some stale pretzels.

He tried not to think about what might be happening to Vinnie somewhere else while he sat here numbing his ass on a barstool.

Then he got his first real ray of hope.

The bar had been at a low hum for a while now, just busy enough that Frank couldn’t turn around to check everyone coming through the door. It was a rough enough crowd that being in a suit and beige trenchcoat was getting him some attention, but as far as he could tell, everyone so far had bought the sad-sack salesman story. He was doing his best to look hangdog.

The bartender finally came over with a pinched look on his face and three inches of something amber in a glass. His lips barely moved. “The guy with the goatee.”

Hey, a concise description that only fit one person in the room, thank God for small favors. He dug out his wallet. “How much do I owe you?”

“Two hundred.”

“You’re telling me that’s a two hundred dollar pour of, what, Scotch?”

“No, it’s cheap rat piss I sell to guys who are too drunk to know the difference. Fuck you, pay me.”

Fair enough. He counted it out. “You’re really living the American dream, aren’t you?”

“If I don’t die trying,” the bartender said.

***

It took another hour for the goatee guy—shaggy-haired and built like a linebacker—to finally beat it. A little less than four hours now before it was everybody out of the pool. His palms were sweating.

He’d seen a lot of things that could be done to the human body by men who’d left their consciences behind them.

Frank tailed Mr. Goatee. For a long time, it wasn’t a rewarding experience. Goatee Boy picked up a girl off the corner, took her to a cheap motel, and wasted another hour of Frank’s time; he stopped off at a convenience store and bought a carton of cigarettes and a couple of scratch lotto tickets.

Then he headed to an old sewing machine factory on the edge of town, and every hair on the back of Frank’s neck stood up.

If he had any chance at all, this was it. Vince could be in there.

He radioed in to Dan.

“You have him?” Dan said instantly.

“Maybe. I’ve got the kind of hideout where you _would_ stash someone, but I can’t say for sure. But I’m gonna have to go in blind, and there’s a chance I could be walking into a crowd.”

“I can sound the alarm. You can have SWAT, agents, whatever you want. Frank, it won’t take that much time.”

Frank half-smiled. “You worried about me, Uncle?” He let his thumb slip off the talk button.

Dan said quietly, “I can’t lose you and Vinnie in one night.”

It felt like somebody’d just made a fist inside his chest, squeezing something there too tight. “Don’t borrow trouble. Nobody’s lost just yet.” He had to make a split-second decision, because otherwise, if things went wrong, he’d spend the whole rest of his life wondering if he’d dilly-dallied in his car and gotten Vince killed. “If we surround the place with sirens, and Vince really is inside, we could be signing his death warrant. I don’t get the feeling guys like this have much to lose. So you hold off for right now, but I’m gonna give you the address, and if you don’t hear from me in… twenty minutes, you rain down all the wrath of God.”

He relayed the address and said a probably-too-sentimental sign-off that he didn’t remember two seconds after it had left his mouth. He headed out into the night.

It was damp and chilly, and his breath kept freezing out in front of him. He made a note to watch that if he had to duck behind something; one of those white puffs would give him away just as easily as an elbow or the toe of a shoe. They might be running some power to the warehouse or have a generator hooked up, but he doubted they were working with full heat and plumbing. As sick as Vince had been, the cold alone would be doing a number on him by now.

If Vince was even here at all.

He’d seen Mr. Goatee go in right through the front, so he made his way around to one of the side doors, the kind of fire exit that usually got the lock jimmied off it so people could sneak out for a smoke.

Thank God for nicotine. He slipped right in.

The layout of the place was easy enough to work out. He’d come in near a break room with peeling wallpaper, a busted vending machine, and a couple of rats nibbling at a long-since-empty box of Chex. Bathrooms were down the hall, and probably the source of that appealing raw sewage smell. Management would be up top, usually in glassed-in offices overlooking the factory floor. And the factory floor would be everything else.

That was where they’d be, if they were anywhere. For some reason, people never broke into out-of-business factories to hang out in the cushy upper offices; they wanted those cement floors.

Frank walked softly.

The hallway came out near a bunch of tattered cardboard boxes still stamped with the sewing machine company’s logo. The rats had been at them, too. Frank slipped between the boxes and the wall and looked through one of the slanting, busted seams of cardboard.

Looked out towards the circle of light in the middle of the factory floor.

 _Vinnie_.

They had him chained by his neck to some kind of post, like he was an attack dog they were training. Even this far away, Frank could see how badly Vinnie was shaking, and he was almost grateful for it; at least it was clear visual evidence that the kid was still alive, despite whatever had been done to him.

They’d left a plastic bucket near Vinnie, an oh-so-considerate latrine, and somehow it was that cheerful yellow bucket, more than the chain, more than the shaking, more than the goddamn imprisonment, that tipped Frank over into a kind of rage that felt like it would sweep out in front of him like a fire. The bucket had a blue wave pattern around the bottom of it. It was a kid’s pail, meant to be taken to the beach to make sandcastles. There was probably a little shovel that had come with it.

 _Oh, I’m going to make sure each and every one of you rots behind bars,_ he thought, staring at the circle of men around Vinnie and seeing them through a red haze. _You lay another finger on him, and I’ll see to it that the rotting happens even quicker._

There were three of them. Mr. Goatee, Mr. Nameless, and a guy Frank recognized as Richard Keene himself.

He could wait for backup and, until then, move only if it looked like they were about to start up again on Vince.

He could do that, but he wasn’t going to.

He stepped out from behind his cover, gun already drawn. “FBI. I want your hands so far up in the air it looks like you’re trying to paint the ceiling.”

It only took a few more steps in their direction before the smell hit him again. It was the same one from the bar—urine and stale slobber and wet dog.

 _Like a kennel_ , he thought again. But there was something wrong about it.

“Frank.” Vinnie pushed himself around the post. He’d been underweight yesterday, but now he looked downright gaunt, the shape of his skull clear right through his skin. He was pasty white, shaking, and pouring with sweat.

He heard the bartender’s voice in his head. _They prep a guy for a few days, making him sick as hell, and then he goes away for a while. And when he comes back—he’s just like all the rest of them._

“Frank, you gotta get out of here.”

“You’re going to want to listen to your friend,” Richard Keene said. He had his hands in the air, but lazily, his arms still casual and bent. His smile looked too big for his face.

“You’re going to want to shut the hell up,” Frank snapped.

“Frank.” Vinnie beat his hands against the floor, like it was the loudest sound he could make. “They’re not human.”

Richard Keene went on smiling that same hard, wide smile. “Like I said. You really should have listened to your friend.”

Then it was like Keene started to melt. His features blurred, running like wax, and he was down on all fours with his body lengthening and thick gray fur sprouting from all sides.

It took until Keene lunged at him for Frank to think, _Wolf._

The damned thing hit him like a fur-covered bus, slamming him into the floor. Frank’s head connected with concrete, making his vision go dark and starry, but for some reason what he kept fixating on was that he’d bitten his tongue and it hurt like hell. The wolf stared down at him, all smug yellow eyes. It reeked of everything he’d caught a whiff of before, and up close and personal, it was a fug thick enough to keep him pinned down all by itself. Its breath smelled like a butcher’s shop. So this was how he was going to die, in a sewing machine factory, killed by a werewolf. He couldn’t even get enough breath to talk; the wind was still knocked out of him.

 _Maybe I won’t make it until backup gets here,_ Frank thought, looking into the wolf’s eyes. He could feel himself ebbing out into unconsciousness, moving with some kind of invisible tide from where he’d conked his head. _Maybe I won’t make it, but they’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth. And Vinnie_ —

But just like that, there was an ear-splitting clash of metal of metal.

And something hit the wolf from behind, tearing it off Frank and wrestling it to the ground.

It was another wolf. Well, why not? What other way was the night going?

He wasn’t thinking straight. He rolled over and saw he’d left a pool of blood behind, right where his head had been.

The other wolf was coal-black.

And it had a choke collar around its neck. A choke collar with a couple dangling links of chain attached to it.

He looked at the post Vinnie had been tied to. Back at the black wolf that was currently fighting for its life against Keene’s gray one.

“Well, shit,” Frank said.

He staggered semi-upright and drew his gun. His vision was too bleary and cockeyed at the moment for him to be sure of hitting the right wolf if he aimed over there, so he pointed it at Goatee Boy and Nameless instead.

“You gonna feel the need to get involved with this?”

Goatee’s head twitched side-to-side. He looked almost paralyzed. So did his buddy.

“Good. Then you get down on the ground and put your hands behind your back so I can see them.” He only had enough cuffs for one, and he didn’t have anything like the hand-eye coordination right now to make even trying for that a good idea: he’d drop the cuffs and wind up handing over his gun. He kept on trying to blink the world back into focus.

“Vinnie,” he said. “Back off him and I can shoot.”

Except in another couple seconds, shooting would have been beside the point. The black wolf was still on his feet, but the gray one was sprawled out on his side, dead in the obvious way something always was when there was that much blood on the ground.

Of course, the black wolf had taken his share of damage. He looked at Frank with those familiar blue eyes. _Puppy dog eyes_ —Jesus Christ.

He guessed he was working off nothing but intuition now, because there sure as hell wasn’t a procedure for this one. He slid his gun back into its holster.

“It’s all right.” He tried to combine the two or three Vinnie-wolves drifting around in front of him into one; he didn’t know what to make eye contact with. “You’re safe. I came here to take you home. You missed your extraction window, you know? You had me worried. Not to say that I would’ve felt any better if I’d known you were off being turned into a werewolf. But it’s over now, Vinnie.”

The wolf lowered his head. There was blood all over his muzzle. Frank guessed he knew what the problem was; it was the same as it had always been. That damn guilt.

He sighed. “You snapped that damn chain off your neck to save my life. Come on.” He awkwardly lowered himself to the ground and put one hand against the wolf’s side. “I’m not much of a dog person, to tell you the truth. Don’t make me start shopping around for kibble.”

Vinnie shook underneath his hand. For a minute there, it was nothing but another one of those feverish shivers, the same he’d had back in his own body, and then, inch by inch, it was Vinnie there in front of him, really Vinnie, still sweat-soaked and sick and beat to hell. Naked, too.

None of which stopped him from wrenching himself away from Frank’s hand and rocking up to his feet, unsteady as a damn baby deer, and going over to the men Frank had left on the ground.

“Look up,” Vinnie said. His voice was hoarse.

They turned their heads up one by one, gazes something close to worshipful.

“I killed Keene,” Vinnie said. “Either one of you want to take a run at me?”

They shook their heads.

“Good. Then maybe we can work something out. In the meantime, get the hell out of here.”

Maybe they were wolves, but they scampered like rabbits.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Frank said quietly.

“No. But what else were we gonna do?”

“Arrest them on kidnapping charges, to start with. Felony assault.”

“Yeah, we can have a real field day explaining the dead wolf on the floor and I can get an express ticket to be cut up at Area 51.” Vinnie rubbed his jaw, like it hurt more than any other part of him. “They’ll listen a little. They can’t help it, not if they think I’m the new Keene.” He looked at Frank and something flickered down in his eyes, like a pilot light of engagement clicking on. “You need a doctor, though, Frank.”

“Mm-hm. We both need a lot of things.” He unbuttoned his coat and handed it to Vinnie. “Here. You’ll look like a flasher, but it’ll have to do. I have to get outside and call the Lifeguard before he calls the cavalry.”

“Thanks,” Vinnie said, and for some reason Frank was pretty sure he just meant thanks for the coat, not thanks for coming to get him.

That worried him a little. Or a lot—maybe this whole thing worried him a lot.

***

It took them an hour to get to Dan’s place. Frank couldn’t drive, and Vinnie shouldn’t have been; they didn’t want to get the car up to anything above a crawl under the circumstances. They stuck to back ways where there wouldn’t be any traffic at this time of night.

“I think we did all right,” Frank said finally, as Vinnie eased into a gap between a brick wall and a Dumpster, a kind of half-assed parking space.

“Yeah, for two beat-up guys driving like we’re blue-haired and about to lose our licenses.”

It was one of the few things Vinnie had said in the last hour, and the only one that was anything besides a question about Frank’s head or how he was feeling.

“We’re here anyway,” Frank said.

Dan let them in. It was maybe the only time Frank had actually seen a guy’s jaw drop.

“What the—Frank, you asked me if I _knew any first aid_ , not if I knew how to patch the two of you up when you look like you’re fresh from a combat zone. What the hell happened? Vinnie, you all right?”

“Frank’s got a concussion,” Vinnie said. “And I need some clothes.”

“Dresser’s in the corner, take whatever you want. And eat something, for God’s sake.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“I like your mother,” Dan said. He waited until Vinnie was out of earshot before he lowered his voice and said to Frank, “What happened to his clothes?”

“He had them on when I found him, he just sort of wrecked them back at the warehouse.” He sat down so Dan could start poking around at his head and tell him, interspersed with questions about whether he was seeing double or having nausea, that he’d be better off going to the hospital.

“You too, Vinnie,” Dan added as Vinnie joined them again.

He had Frank’s coat slung over one arm. Dressed in one of Dan’s sweaters and some corduroy pants, he looked different from any other time Frank had seen him, and this was one time when Frank would have really appreciated him looking the same. He thought they were probably both full up on different for one night.

“I’m fine,” Vinnie said.

Frank shook his head, making it throb even more. “You’re not even close. I talked to the bartender at that dive of Keene’s—you’re part of a pattern, Vinnie. Keene picks up potential followers, drugs or infects them somehow—”

“I know how,” Vinnie said. “Once he took it too far to undo it, he couldn’t shut up about it. Weaken the immune system with these little doses of this special kind of wolfsbane, get the body ready for what’s gonna happen to it. And then he bit—” His hand closed on his arm. “And then you chain the guy up to see whether or not he lives through it. Total loyalty to Keene. And nowhere else to go, because then you’re a fucking monster.”

Dan looked back and forth between them and said, “I think one of you needs to catch me up here.”

“Keene was a werewolf,” Frank said. “Because they’re real, apparently. He made Vinnie one too. Keene’s dead and his men ran off with their tails between their legs. Not literally, but maybe literally, because it’s been that kind of night.”

“I killed him with my _teeth_ , Frank.”

“You saved my life,” Frank said calmly. “And you must have about choked yourself to death doing it, too, pulling at that chain like you were. Once we verify that nothing about you’s going to scream ‘werewolf,’ we’re taking you to the ER.” He looked at Dan. “Sorry to be dumping you into the middle of all this.”

He’d gone a little pale, and he was maybe a little thrown, but all he said was, “Hey, what’s a lifeguard for if not to help you out right in the middle of the deep end? C’mere, Vinnie, let me get a good look at you.”

Vinnie just stood there, holding onto his arm where Keene had bitten him and reaching up with his other hand to rub his jaw where he’d bitten back. “It’s not safe.”

“Sit down and shut up,” Frank said shortly. “‘Not safe,’ my ass, you warned me to try to get me out of there, you turned so you could haul Keene off me, and it’s not like you chewed my arm off or even mauled Keene’s guys for what they’d done to you. I don’t care if he told you you were going to turn Wolf Man every time the moon’s full. Nobody ever made you a monster, Vinnie, and you’re not going to start being one now. So sit down before you fall down, will you? Looking up at you right now isn’t doing anything for my headache.”

Vinnie stared at him and then one corner of his mouth finally tugged up, almost like he didn’t even mean it to, and he sank down on the bed next to Frank. Their shoulders touched, and Vinnie didn’t lean away from him. Didn’t act _contaminated_ or _unsafe_.

“Happy now, Frank?”

“Ecstatic.”

Dan reached out and took Vinnie’s hand, holding it for just a second; it was the kind of thing Frank was never any good with.

“You’re gonna have to show all this off for me at some point,” Dan said. He tilted Vinnie’s chin back and looked at the necklace of bruises on his throat; felt his pulse. “I always was a dog person.”

“Frank’s not,” Vinnie said. The smile was getting a little more real. Still shaky, but there.

“Really? Could have fooled me.”

Frank closed his eyes, half-listening to the check-up as it went on. “How about the next time I tell you I’m pulling you out, you actually remember I’m in charge for once? Just as a personal favor. For once do a job without going off on your own.”

He thought he probably drifted off before Vinnie answered just in self-defense, wanting to spare himself from knowing there’d be no way Vinnie would ever keep that particular promise. It wasn't too accurate, anyway, saying Vinnie was on his own. He never was. Not in any way that counted.


End file.
